A Film Canon

 

 

In keeping with Lenin's maxim that "being organised means unity of action", this astonishing debut imbues the cinematic screen with the tautness of a sheet of water, its movements reduced and cohered to so many manifestations of surface tension. It feels as if every object in Eisenstein's universe has such an extraordinary energetic potential that periods of stasis or delicacy simply reflect a lack of net, rather than gross, movement, the dialectic opposition of forces so great that their combination produces the poetic surplus that Strike attempts to capture, most explicitly in its elevation of the crowd to the shimmering fludity of an oil slick. To this end, Eisenstein elides conventional perspectives, prioritising shots in which the geometric configuration of workers and machinery affirms the coherence of the screen, rather than that of physical reality; or, more accurately, conflates the latter with psychic reality, attempting to offer a cinema shot at the speed of thought, epitomised by a reversed sequence depicting conspiring workers emerging out of a settling puddle of water, as if to convey the gradual awakening that they themselves are experiencing. This is all enhanced by an unprecedented attempt to conflate the camera with the machinery that it depicts, as well as innovations in typage and symbolic montage, culminating with the iconic juxtaposition of the defeated strikers and the slaughter of a cow.